These people somehow believe a foreign entity has some kind of say.

International Tribunal Lawsuit an Unconstitutional Attempt to Subvert Second Amendment

“If the US can’t fix its gun policy, maybe an international lawsuit can,” attorney and Global Action on Gun Violence (GAGV) President Jonathan Lowy declares in an opinion piece in The Boston Globe. “Lax US gun policy has caused an international public health and safety crisis, and blatantly violates human rights laws.”

Lowy, former Chief Counsel and VP Legal for Brady, “filed papers … under the Foreign Agents Registration Act to provide legal and consulting services to the government of Mexico and plans to work with other nations on similar efforts,” Time reported in 2022. “Lowy has already worked with the government of Mexico and lawyers in Canada to file three lawsuits against U.S. gunmakers in the last four years.” (The Mexican government argued that the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) does not extend to damages caused in Mexican territory and tiled an appeal after its $10B complaint was dismissed in a Boston federal court last year).

“Joaquin Oliver v USA was filed in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an independent legal body of the Organization of American States,” New York advertising agency Zulu Alpha Kilo announced in September. “The lawsuit argues that Inter-American human rights law requires the United States to prevent firearms manufacturers, distributors, and dealers from recklessly making and selling guns in ways that cause deaths and injuries.

“The US, like other nations, is obligated to protect the exercise of these human rights; a State cannot simply tolerate its people to be systematically and repeatedly deprived of their lives,” the publicity release elaborated. “The suit explains that US gun policies and the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment decisions are inconsistent with the human right to live that the US is required to respect, and enable the gun industry to profit from crime throughout the region.”

The ones truly profiting, of course, are corrupt Mexican officials and their cartel patrons, who aren’t getting actual military equipment and grenades from U.S. gun shops and onesie-twosie “straw purchasers.”

That Lowy’s shakedown effort is being managed by professional ad agency spin doctors says much in terms of Astroturf vs. grassroots. Gun owners have seen before the misinformation that results from high production value “PSAs” representing themselves as reliable documentation instead of what they really are – scripted commercials engineered to get the viewers to “buy” something. So where’s the money coming from?

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Analysis: ‘One Weird Trick’ to Uphold Gun Restrictions Returns to Federal Court

particularly flimsy legal theory has reappeared in federal Second Amendment litigation.

On Monday, US District Judge John L. Kane upheld Colorado’s three-day waiting period for gun purchases. He ruled the sales restriction didn’t violate the Second Amendment. His reasoning? The Second Amendment doesn’t actually protect gun sales at all.

“After examining the language of the Second Amendment using the Supreme Court’s analysis in Heller, I find, for the purposes of Plaintiffs’ Motion, that the plain text does not cover the waiting period required by the Act,” he wrote in Rocky Mountain Gun Owners v. Polis. “This conclusion is bolstered by the fact that the Act is a regulation on the commercial sale of firearms and thus is presumptively permissible.”

Judge Kane, a Jimmy Carter appointee, said the state’s restriction passes the Second Amendment test established in the Supreme Court’s New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen decision by effectively short-circuiting it. Instead of examining the historical record for analogs to the modern waiting period, he argued that was unnecessary because the “right to keep and bear arms” doesn’t directly mention a right to buy, make, or sell them.

“From this reading of the plain text, it is clear the relevant conduct impacted by the waiting period—the receipt of a paid-for firearm without delay—is not covered,” he wrote. “Still, Plaintiffs attempt to equate the words ‘obtain’ and ‘possess.’ But these terms are not equivalent. To ‘keep,’ under the definitions provided in Heller, meant to retain an object one already possessed. It did not mean to receive a newly paid-for item, and it certainly did not mean to receive that item without delay. Likewise, ‘hav[ing] weapons’ indicates the weapons are already in one’s possession, not that one is receiving them.”

As I said when a judge in the Ninth Circuit employed the same logic to uphold a homemade gun ban last year, this is like a “one weird trick that plaintiffs hate” theory of Bruen. There’s no need to perform the analysis the Supreme Court requires if you cut the case off before it even really begins.

“Though it leads with a recognition of the primacy of Bruen’s ‘plain text’ point, [the plaintiff] seeks in its opening brief to jump ahead in the analysis to a historical/tradition assessment (and to jump ahead in Bruen to that decision’s discussion of how to conduct such an assessment),” Judge George H. Wu wrote in his ruling rejecting a request for a preliminary injunction against California’s ban on unserialized homemade guns. “But it has effectively attempted to avoid the necessary threshold consideration – does the ‘Second Amendment’s plain text’ cover the issue here? No, it plainly does not. AB 1621 has nothing to do with ‘keep[ing]’ or ‘bear[ing]’ arms.”

There has been a lot of disagreement among the lower court as to how best to implement the Bruen test. Judges have come down on different sides of whether the same restrictions have relevantly similar historical analogues. That disagreement will likely continue until the Supreme Court steps in and further clarifies how lower courts should carry out its test–a process it’s expected to start in its current case United States v. Rahimi.

But the idea that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear arms but not the right to make or acquire arms isn’t likely to be part of that clarification. It’s simply too cute by half. The argument makes you wonder what exactly Judge Kane and Wu think the point of protecting keeping and bearing arms is if the government can simply ban their manufacture or sale.

Judge Kane seemed to realize this because he did go through an attempt to do the actual Bruen analysis. He ruled that the law would still stand even if the Second Amendment protects sales. He argued colonial-era laws that disarmed intoxicated people were relevantly similar to the waiting period because both aimed at “preventing impulsive acts of firearm violence.”

“These measures are sufficient to show that our Nation had a historical tradition of regulating the carrying and use of firearms by intoxicated individuals,” Judge Kane wrote. “Plaintiffs do not seem to dispute this determination, but instead focus on whether those regulations are ‘relevantly similar’ to the Waiting-Period Act. For the purposes of this proceeding, I hold that they are.”

That line of argument doesn’t seem much more likely to persuade the Supreme Court–if it ever makes it that far up the ladder. But it at least engages with the test the Court handed down. The idea that the Second Amendment provides no protection at all to the act of acquiring arms is little more than an attempt to hand wave away Bruen.

On this day in history, November 17, 1871, National Rifle Association founded by Civil War veteran officers

Former Union officers, who had led the costly battlefield effort to free 4 million Americans from bondage, chartered the National Rifle Association (NRA) in New York City on this day in history, Nov. 17, 1871.

Civil War veterans Col. William C. Church and Gen. George Wingate created the organization after they were “dismayed by the lack of marksmanship shown by their troops,” states the NRA in its online history.

The association was determined to “promote and encourage rifle shooting on a scientific basis,” Church wrote in a contemporary magazine editorial, the NRA reports.

Ambrose Burnside was the first president of the fledging organization.

General Burnside led federal troops in many of the early encounters of the Civil War. He served as governor of Rhode Island after the war, from 1866 to 1869.

Following his stint as NRA president (1871-72), Burnside served as a U.S. senator from Rhode Island from 1875 to 1881.

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November 17

1558 – Queen Mary I of England dies and is succeeded by her half sister Elizabeth I of England.

1800 –Congress holds its first session in Washington, D.C.

1820 – Commanding his sloop Hero, 21 year old Captain Nathaniel Palmer becomes the first American to see Antarctica.

1831 – The nations of Ecuador and Venezuela are separated from Gran Colombia.

1856 – On the Sonoita River in present day southern Arizona, the U. S. Army establishes Fort Buchanan in order to help control the new lands acquired in the Gadsden Purchase.

1858 – The city of Denver, Colorado is founded.

1863 – During the Civil War, Confederate forces led by General James Longstreet place Knoxville, Tennessee under siege.

1869 – The Suez Canal, linking the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea, is opened for sea traffic.

1896 – The Western Pennsylvania Hockey League, which later became the first ice hockey league to openly trade and hire players, begins play at Pittsburgh’s Schenley Park Casino.

1903 – The Russian  (Communist) Social Democratic Labor Party splits into two groups: The Bolsheviks “majority” and Mensheviks “minority”.

1910 – Piloting a damaged and improperly repaired Wright Model B aircraft, Ralph Johnstone becomes the first American to die in a plane crash.

1947 – American scientists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs, construct the first working transistor

1950 – Lhamo Dondrub is named Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.

1962 – President Kennedy dedicates Washington Dulles International Airport, serving the Washington, D.C., region.

1970 – Lieutenant William Calley goes on trial for the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.

1973 – In Orlando, Florida, President Nixon announces to a group of Associated Press managing editors “I am not a crook.”

1986 – The flight crew of Japan Airlines Flight 1628, a Boeing 747 cargo jet, report sighting multiple UFOs following the aircraft while flying over Alaska.

1993 – The House of Representatives passes a resolution to establish the North American Free Trade Agreement.

2003 – Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger takes office as the governor of California on the recall of governor Gray Davis.

2013 – A late season tornado outbreak strikes the Midwest with Illinois and Indiana the most affected states. Over 70  tornadoes touch down in an 11 hour time period, killing 8 people, injuring over 190 more and causing over $1.6 billion in damage.

2019 – The first known case of COVID-19 is traced to a 55 year old man who had visited a market in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China.

 

Pathogens Labeled ‘HIV’ and ‘Ebola’ Found Inside Secret, Illegal Chinese-Owned Biolab in California

Thousands of vials of biological substances — including some labeled “HIV” — and a freezer marked “Ebola” were found inside a secret Chinese-owned biolab in California which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and FBI initially refused to investigate, according to a House committee report released Wednesday.

The illegal lab was operated in the city of Reedley, Calif., and the potential public safety risk it posed only came to light in December 2022 when Jesalyn Harper, an observant code enforcement officer, noticed a green garden hose sticking out of a hole in the side of a warehouse that was thought to be vacant for more than a decade.

Once inside, Harper discovered laboratory equipment, manufacturing devices, medical-grade freezers, lab mice and vials labeled in Mandarin, English and in a code that remains undeciphered.

She also encountered several individuals in lab coats who identified themselves as Chinese nationals.

Greeley biolab

The hose sticking out of the hole thought to be a vacant warehouse tipped off a Greeley code enforcement officer.
AP

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Of course they do, they’re bureaucraps

National Transportation Safety Board Calls For Speed-Limiting Tech in Cars.

The National Transportation Safety Bureau (NTSB) is an independent review agency in the federal government. They’re the group which get called when a plane crashes, or a train goes off the rails, or, in this particular case, when a speeding car crashes into a minivan in North Las Vegas and nine people die from this one wreck alone, as happened in 2022. After reviewing that wreck, the NTSB recommends that our cars warn us, inhibit us, or prevent us from speeding.

The NTSB said on Tuesday that the 2022 North Las Vegas crash “highlights [the] need for intelligent speed assistance technology and countermeasures including interlock program for repeat speeding offenders.” What is intelligent speed assistance technology? Here is the clarification, direct from the NTSB press release:

Intelligent speed assistance technology, or ISA, uses a car’s GPS location compared with a database of posted speed limits and its onboard cameras to help ensure safe and legal speeds. Passive ISA systems warn a driver when the vehicle exceeds the speed limit through visual, sound, or haptic alerts, and the driver is responsible for slowing the car. Active systems include mechanisms that make it more difficult, but not impossible, to increase the speed of a vehicle above the posted speed limit and those that electronically limit the speed of the vehicle to fully prevent drivers from exceeding the speed limit.

It is not the NTSB’s role to carry out this recommendation. it is not a policy-making body. It is just an agency that reviews transportation disasters, figures out how they happened, and makes recommendations on how to keep them from happening.

The wreck itself that spurred this recommendation was particularly egregious but little about it sounds surprising. As the NTSB report notes, a driver and passenger in a 2018 Dodge Challenger ran a red light at 103 mph, hitting a Toyota Sienna with seven people inside. The light had been red for 29 seconds. All nine people died.

As the NTSB notes, some 12,330 people died in speeding-related crashes in 2021 alone, roughly a third of all traffic deaths in the U.S. What is abundantly clear is that something needs to change, and we all know that relying on cops to pull people over isn’t working for anybody.

Milwaukee Paper Discovers ‘Gun Death’ Lie

The term “gun death” is popular among gun control advocates and their politicians who push that same agenda. It’s a simple enough term, too. It’s simply the total number of people killed with a firearm, regardless of who pulled the trigger or why.

It might even be a useful statistic in some cases.

However, when talking about guns and gun control, it’s misdirection at best and a case of lying with facts at its worst.

It’s an effort to lump all such fatalities together to make the issue seem bigger than it is. And it seems folks at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel got an eye-opener on the topic recently.

Gun deaths are rising in Wisconsin, but the people affected by it might surprise you. The narrative around gun violence is often limited to urban homicides, but the vast majority of deaths by guns are suicides. In fact, a new report from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel finds that suicides make up more than two-thirds of all deaths by guns in Wisconsin.…

“Of 100 gun deaths that [occur] in Wisconsin, roughly 25 of those are homicides. And then there’s another one to 2% that are accidents or police involved shootings,” [Investigative reporter John] Diedrich explains. “The idea that 71 out of 100 gun deaths in Wisconsin are suicides was an eye-opener to me and to our readers.”

Diedrich acknowledges that suicides are, in fact, a mental health issue, but he’s paraphrased as saying that when those issues arise, gun owners have a very deadly means to take their own life.

I don’t dispute that fact. However, starting with that last point, if they already have the means to take their own life, what good would new gun control laws do?

Moving back to the deeper point, that Diedrich was shocked by this, I can’t say that I am. We’ve long known that most of the “gun deaths” cited by anti-gun activists were, in fact, suicides. We know why they do it, too. The truth is that when you look at the total number of homicides year over year and consider them against the total population of the United States, it doesn’t look nearly scary enough.

So, they lump in suicides and accidents and call them gun deaths, all in hopes that no one will dig too deeply.

When they do, they get a bit of a wakeup call.

It’s also why I really think we in the gun community need to step up and deal with mental health. We need to be champions of improvement in mental health efforts and be advocates for those in our lives who suffer from mental illness.

If we can reduce the number of suicides, we reduce the number of gun deaths. We take away the gun control crowd’s ammunition, even if that ammunition is based on what amounts to a lie.

In Milwaukee, at least one journalist has woken up to at least part of that lie. The question is whether he’ll realize the rest of it and do his part to combat the constant flow of misinformation from here on out.

Trends in Active Killer Interdiction by Armed Citizens

A lot of active killers are stopped by armed citizens despite what the mainstream media hides from you.  The Crime Prevention Research Center estimates that 34% of active killer attacks are stopped by armed citizens, a much different number than what is declared by the FBI crime statistics.  Even the FBI, however, points out that most such attacks happen in gun free zones.  The truth is, many such attacks have even been stopped through unarmed resistance, but the success rate of armed interdiction is much higher, at over 90% success rate for the citizen.  

The fact is that we now have a fairly extensive list of incidents in which rampaging killers, armed with long guns, have been stopped by armed citizens on the scene who are armed with handguns.  Many question the ability to stop a bad guy with superior weaponry if you are armed with only your carry pistol at the time, but this is not a hypothetical question of “can it be done.”  Rather, it has been done, many times, and the armed citizen prevails the vast majority of the time.  While the perpetrator may be armed with a rifle, and may be wearing body armor, the lesser-armed citizen still has the ultimate advantage of surprise, and typically prevails.  So, the debate over whether or not it can be done can be put to rest.  Rather, we should focus on the lessons learned and the trends apparent in such incidents.  

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You’ll Smash Your Kid’s Smartphone After Reading This

Some of us – and I include more PJ Media VIP commenters than I can count – weren’t even half-joking when we said that if 9/11/2001 had been 9/11/2023, thousands or millions of Americans would take to the streets in support of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

Sad to say, we were right.

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks that left nearly 3,000 dead and permanently altered the New York City skyline, bin Laden wrote his Letter to America, justifying his murderous act of terrorism, in part because of our “support to the oppressive Israelis in their occupation of our Palestine.”

The letter for some reason (I’ll get to that momentarily) resurfaced from the super-left-wing British paper, The Guardian, which for more than 20 years has hosted an English-language translation.

Thousands of young Americans took to TikTok to express how bin Laden’s words have opened their eyes.

“So I just read a Letter to America,” is one typical TikToker comment, “and I will never look at life the same. I will never look at this country the same. I will never… please, read it.”

HuffPo’s Yashir Ali — an Iranian-American and no right-winger — had this to say:

The TikToks are from people of all ages, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds. Many of them say that reading the letter has opened their eyes, and they’ll never see geopolitical matters the same way again.

Many of them — and I have watched a lot — say it has made them reevaluate their perspective on how what is often labeled as terrorism can be a legitimate form of resistance to a hostile power.

How bad is the situation, really? The Guardian felt it necessary to delete its “Letter to the American People” page.

Every one of the TikTok videos I’ve watched today on your behalf encourages viewers to go read the bin Laden letter and then hop back on TikTok to share their thoughts. That’s more important than it might seem at first if you think of TikTok as a social engineering machine rather than as a social media platform.

One of TikTok’s jobs is to provide sensitive data to its Communist Chinese parent company, ByteDance. That’s why India banned the app completely and why the U.S. federal government and the New York state government have banned employees from having TikTok on their phones. “China’s Communist Party had ‘supreme access’ to all data held by TikTok’s parent company Bytedance, including on servers in the United States,” according to a one-time employee in a CNN Business report from earlier this year.

Arguably worse is TikTok’s algorithm. The version tailored for China’s domestic audience serves up wholesome “eat your vegetables, brush your teeth, do your homework” content for young Chinese users. The American algorithm takes the fringes of society and parades them around as the new normal. All those self-loathing, America-hating, purple-haired, over-pierced weirdos whose videos I post each week on Insanity Wrap promote themselves on TikTok because TikTok promotes them.

TikTok promotes the bin Laden letter people, who will make their own bin Laden letter videos which TikTok will then also promote. Jewish Insider editor-in-chief Josh Kraushaar reminded his readers of the “scary reality” that “TikTok is the top ‘news’ source for 18-29-year-olds.”

Thanks in part to TikTok, a segment of American youth is moving very quickly from a lame moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas to thinking bin Laden was right to murder 3,000 people on 9/11.

Ban TikTok and ban it now.

How Common Is The AR-15

he AR-15 is one of the most common rifles in the world and has a large, diverse user base. Its success is due to many things, such as its adaptability, modular design, and reliability. They have subjected the AR platform to a great deal of abuse in a variety of environments, and it continues to perform exceedingly well.

How Many AR-15s Are in The United States

The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) estimated that there are over 24 million Modern Sporting Rifles (MSR) in the United States, which include AR and AK-style rifles. Some estimates have the overall number of firearms in the US, including handguns, at over 400 million.

Why is an AR-15 a Popular Gun?

The AR-15 is a popular choice among everyday gun owners for various purposes, including sporting events, home defense, and recreational shooting.

The AR-15 is a modular design, and because of that, you can customize and upgrade parts easily. The flexibility to personalize the rifle to suit the needs of each shooter is a big reason for its widespread popularity. You can use the same base gun for sports shooting, competitions, and personal protection.

How Common is an AR-15?

The Washington Post did a survey at the end of 2022 and estimated that 31% of adults own a firearm; out of that, 20% owned an AR-15-style rifle. That’s 6% of the adult population.

“The data suggests that, with a US population of 260.8 million adults, about 16 million Americans own an AR-15.”

The AR-15 accounted for only 1.2% of all sales in 1990 but jumped to 23.4% in 2020.

 

In Common Use

Recently, the term “in common use has come up.” The Supreme Court determined that the Second Amendment protects firearms “in common use” by “law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes” in its historic DC v. Heller ruling. The court ruled that if the gun is “in common use,” it is covered under the Second Amendment.

 

In March, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, John Feinblatt, tweeted, “1 in 4 guns sold in America is an AR-15. 1 in 20 Americans owns an AR-15.” His organization is anti-gun, and you would think his numbers would support the claim that AR’s are not in common use, but they appear to do just the opposite.

If one out of every four guns made is an AR and one in twenty people owns one, it seems common. Its widespread popularity makes it one of the most recognizable and commonly owned rifles worldwide. The AR-15 is arguably the most popular rifle in America.

November 16

1532 – Having hidden several artillery pieces in houses that had been evacuated by the Inca, Francisco Pizarro and his men ambush and take Inca Emperor Atahualpa hostage at Cajamarca, Peru.

1776 –  Refusing to abandon the garrison, American Colonel Robert Magaw is finally forced to surrender Fort Washington, on the north end of Manhattan Island, to British and Hessian forces under Lieutenant General William Howe.

1822 – Missouri trader William Becknell arrives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, over a route that will become known as the Santa Fe Trail.

1871 – The National Rifle Association receives its charter from New York State.

1904 – English engineer John Ambrose Fleming receives a patent for the thermionic valve vacuum tube.

1907 – Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory join to form Oklahoma, which is admitted as the 46th U.S. state.

1914 – The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States officially opens.

1938 – LSD is first synthesized by Albert Hofmann at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland.

1940 – In occupied Poland, Nazis close off the Warsaw Ghetto stopping anyone from entering or leaving.

1958 – National Airlines Flight 967, a Douglas DC-7. explodes in mid-air over the Gulf of Mexico, killing all 42 passengers and crew aboard.

1965 – The Soviet Union launches the Venera 3 space probe toward Venus,  the first spacecraft to reach the surface of another planet.

1973 – President Nixon signs the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act, authorizing the construction of the Alaska Pipeline.

1974 – A interstellar radio message, developed by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, carrying basic information about humanity and Earth is transmitted from the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico towards the globular cluster Messier 13.

2002 – The first cases of the 2002–2004 SARS corona virus outbreak are traced to Foshan, Guangdong Province, China.

2009 – NASA launches Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-129 to the International Space Station.

2022 – NASA launches Artemis 1 on the first flight of the Space Launch System, the start of the program’s future missions to the moon.

 

The Gun Joe Biden Doesn’t Want You To Have Just Protected His Own Granddaughter

Secret Service reportedly opened fire Sunday night on three suspects attempting to break into an unmarked government vehicle parked in front of the Georgetown home of Naomi Biden, President Joe Biden’s granddaughter. Reports allege that the three offenders fled the scene after the gunfire started.

These types of scenarios are exactly why Americans advocate for the Second Amendment, but unfortunately, not all citizens have the same protection the Biden family is afforded.

Residents of Washington, D.C., are forced to navigate an onslaught of regulation and red tape before they can use firearms for self-preservation. According to D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, residents have the “authority to carry firearm[s]” only in “certain places and for certain purposes.” Concealed carry requires a variety of applications and training, while “open carry is prohibited.”

MPDC / DC POLICE DEPARTMENT WEBSITE

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State Rep. Dan Caulkins files petition to U.S. Supreme to review Assault Weapons Ban decision

DECATUR, Ill. (WRSP) — State Representative Dan Caulkins (R-Decatur) has petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States to review the Illinois Supreme Court’s decision on Illinois’ weapons ban law on due process, equal protection, and Second Amendment grounds.

Caulkins believes the issue is the denial of due process under the 14th Amendment arising from Justices Elizabeth Rochford and Mary Kay O’Brien participating in the case despite overwhelming reasons they should have recused themselves.

He feels that both justices received disproportionate contributions from the leaders of the co-equal branches of government in the aggregate sum of more than $2.5 million calling into question their impartiality and independence.

He says that both justices received the endorsement of G-PAC, which states: “Each endorsed candidate supports our #1 legislative priority when the General Assembly is called into session: banning assault weapons and large-capacity magazines.”

Both Justice Rochford and O’Brien received disproportionate campaign contributions, and both made a commitment to support the legislative policy of banning assault weapons,” Caulkins said. “Additionally, the donations to these justices came from Gov. JB Pritzker and House Speaker Chris Welch which calls into question the independence of the judiciary and the separation of powers.

Given the size of the campaign contributions and who gave the contributions, there not only is a question of fairness and impartiality, there also is a question of the independence of the Justices which calls into question the validity of the state court decision.

Caulkins said the due process under the 14th Amendment argument calls into question the fairness of the proceedings at the Illinois Supreme Court, but the petition also asks for a review of the substance of the case which centers on the three readings requirement in the Illinois Constitution, the Second Amendment, and the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

The petition states:

There exists no rational basis to criminalize one person indistinguishable in any manner based on conduct from another immunized from the criminal liability or to speculate that the prohibited present a greater risk for mass shootings than the grandfathered based on the date an assault weapon was acquired.

The grandfathered who are immunized from criminal liability for possession have no greater training than the prohibited merely because the grandfathered already possess an assault weapon. Or, if the grandfathered are presumed to be safe (lawful) to possess assault weapons by mere possession, then the prohibited would satisfy the same safety presumption if allowed to acquire and possess.

The fortuity of time of acquisition bears no connection to safety or danger. The resulting arbitrary classification on the face of the Assault Weapons Partial Ban fails all levels of scrutiny test and should be invalidated on this additional basis.

This petition is about the thousands of plaintiffs who joined my lawsuit and were denied a fair proceeding at the Illinois State Supreme Court,” Caulkins said. “The Illinois Supreme Court does not have an objective standard for recusals. The Court relies on individual justices to determine if there is a conflict. The end result is an unfair process that leads to biased outcomes. We are asking the U.S. Supreme to review this case based on the lack of fairness as well as the merits of our arguments against the weapons ban law.

Czech News Crew Covering APEC Robbed at Gunpoint in Stringently Gun-Controlled San Francisco

A news crew from the Czech Republic was robbed at gunpoint Sunday evening while in the Bay Area to cover the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that “Czech TV journalist Bohumil Vostal was capturing what he thought would be a majestic shot — San Francisco’s iconic City Lights bookstore, steeped in the gathering dusk — when three masked assailants approached with guns pointed.”

The suspects were able to get away with over $18,000 worth of equipment before fleeing the scene in a sedan.

Vostal indicated that by taking the equipment, the suspects also managed to take footage which had been shot while the Czech crew traversed San Francisco.

KTVU noted that Bay Area stations “often send armed guards with reporters and photographers” as their crews cover stories in San Francisco.

San Francisco is located in California, the state with the most gun control of any state in the Union.

California has universal background checks, an “assault weapons” ban, gun registration requirements, a 10-day waiting period on gun purchases, a limit on the number of guns a law-abiding citizen can buy each month, a ban on campus carry for self-defense, a ban on K-12 teachers being armed for classroom defense, strict regulations on firearms Democrats refer to as “ghost guns,” strict regulations on firearm marketing practices, a background check requirement for ammunition purchases, and numerous other gun and ammunition controls.

While California is No. 1 for gun control, FBI figures showed the state was also No. 1 for “active shooter incidents” in 2021.

When some jihadi makes a spectacle of himself, don’t forget to put the blame where it belongs; a goobermint and its open border policy

FBI Director Confirms Hamas-Led Threats Against Americans in the U.S. Now at ‘Whole Other Level’

FBI Director Christopher Wray testified Wednesday before the House Committee on Homeland Security and revealed that, due to the Israel-Hamas war, “The threat of an attack against Americans in the United States” has been raised “to a whole other level.”

In his prepared remarks, Wray provided more context to those threats: “Since October 7th, we’ve seen a rogue’s gallery of foreign terrorist organizations call for attacks against Americans and our allies. Hizballah expressed its support and praise for Hamas and threatened to attack U.S. interests in the Middle East. Al-Qaida issued its most specific call to attack the United States in the last five years. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula called on jihadists to attack Americans and Jewish people everywhere. ISIS urged its followers to target Jewish communities in the United States and Europe.”

In short, Americans are under threat both at home and abroad; not surprisingly, Jews are most at risk from these threats.

During questioning from the House panel, Wray admitted that the threats could be tied to pro-Hamas elements and global bad actors.

WATCH:

TRANSCRIPT:

Certainly we’re in an environment where a number of tips and threats that are being reported to us have gone up significantly since October 7. We are already, as I testified earlier, already at an elevated threat environment even before October 7, and it’s gone to a whole other level since October 7.

The biggest chunks of the threats that have been reported in to us, but a good margin, are threats to the Jewish community. Synagogues, Jewish prominent officials, things like that. We also have a large number of tips and leads related specifically to Hamas and radicalization and recruitment.

As RedState has previously reported, Jews make up 2.4 percent of the total U.S. population but are the target of more than 50 percent of the religiously motivated hate crimes reported to the FBI. And this was before the October 7 massacre.

Worryingly, Wray also admitted at the Wednesday hearing that there are individuals on the terror watch list who may have slipped into the U.S. illegally and whose whereabouts are currently unknown. Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX) asked Wray, “Are there people that you don’t where they are that the FBI is searching for today? Yes or no?” Wray responded with a simple, “Yes.”

Despite Wray’s confirmation that threats against Americans by Hamas sympathizers have seen a dramatic rise in the past six weeks, the official threat level of the United States has not been raised since May 24:

The United States remains in a heightened threat environment. Lone offenders and small groups motivated by a range of ideological beliefs and personal grievances continue to pose a persistent and lethal threat to the Homeland. Both domestic violent extremists (DVEs) and those associated with foreign terrorist organizations continue to attempt to motivate supporters to conduct attacks in the Homeland, including through violent extremist messaging and online calls for violence.

It’s worth reading Wray’s entire prepared statement; surprisingly, there are a lot of good nuggets in there about the precise nature and targets of these threats.